Cobourg Blog

In about 1995 I started lugging around a laptop as part of my job for the obvious benefit of taking most of your office with you. When I got home or checked into a hotel, I would plug into the phone jack and download emails at about 20kbps. There were no social sites like Facebook and no home video sites like YouTube but we were a lot more connected than only a few years earlier. Even in 2000, this was the situation. Today, I went to the Human Bean and used their free wireless network to do the same thing except at much higher speeds. There are 3 places I know of where you can do this in Cobourg. But I am behind the “mobility times” - many people have Blackberries and do the same thing anywhere - not just in a cafe or hotel.

This is an incredibly fast change - I can’t think of all the social implications but they will come. This is as certain as the fact that Tibet is now in the Internet world and Chinese actions cannot be hidden from the world like they could when the Dalai Lama was forced to leave. Technology sometimes changes the way we live as well as the way we work. Examples: Telegraph, phone, TV, Internet, High speed Internet, Social networks…. What will be next? Biological technology has also made big social changes - antibiotics, effective birth control and more.

Hiding from technology does not help. Saying “I don’t need or want to participate” is not like insisting that radio is just as good as TV - it’s more like saying that being a hermit is better than living in a town. The world will change - you can either participate and benefit or live in a world that no longer exists.

But human nature is such that change is resisted - by some more than others. Some change should be resisted (e.g. pulling down historical buildings) but other changes both technological and social are inevitable. We should try to cope with them rather than try to stop them. This is a wide ranging comment - I don’t want to colour it (yet) by picking on a particular “change” but I’m sure others will!

John Draper